Saturday, June 30, 2012

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has just died at the age of 96. Rather than discuss his broader career, I’d like to tell you about my most memorable meeting with him.

It was January 13, 1991. Everyone in the world knew that in 48 hours, a U.S.-led coalition was scheduled to attack Iraq in order to force Saddam Hussein’s withdrawal from Kuwait. Saddam had announced that if the coalition attacked he would strike at Israel with long-range missiles, possibly with biological or chemical warheads.

I was asked by a visiting American delegation to accompany it to a meeting with the prime minister. We arrived at the prime minister’s office and went to his quite modest meeting room. Along with Shamir was Elyakim Rubinstein, then the cabinet secretary but today a Supreme Court justice. I won’t tell you who the Americans were but I’d love to do so and perhaps will some day but the group’s leader, let’s call him Mr. Bird, later held high diplomatic positions in the U.S. government.

Shamir sought to break the ice with a friendly question. “So,” he said to the delegation’s leader, “how long are you planning to be here? A week?”

What to make of Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi's election as president of Egypt? What seems to be the most likely outcome is something analogous to the "constitutional settlements" of the early Roman Empire. That is, the military, like the Emperor Augustus in antiquity, will entrust to itself management of foreign policy, while granting Morsi (and a parliament, if new elections are allowed) - akin to the Senate in Rome - considerable autonomy with regards to the direction of domestic affairs, even as the military has assumed control over the drafting of the constitution.

The most obvious reason is that the Chinese--one important official called it the "little superpower--perceive that Israel in particular and the Jewish people in general have been success stories. Ten or twenty years ago this would have been less unique in the world. But now, sad to say, it stands out more because the United States and Europe, perhaps only temporarily, are not working very well.

A three-hour tour here today, made with local guides who picked paths around Israeli tanks, showed destruction on a scale far greater than that seen in the other Palestinian cities that have fallen before Israel's offensive, its biggest ground operation in 20 years.
Israel says Jenin was a center of terrorism, which it is determined to weed out. Israeli officials have spoken of 100 to 200 dead here, and Palestinians have estimated two, three, or four times that number. No one yet knows how many were killed in fighting that has lasted 11 days, and is now all but over, but already the battle here seems certain to be argued over in the contest between the Israelis and Palestinians.
...
Israel says that its soldiers were careful to avoid shooting civilians, and that most of the dead were fighters. Residents of the camp said many civilians were killed.

There is no mention in the article of the dead soldiers, just this:

A public relations struggle is under way over this ruined place. The battle for the Jenin camp is already becoming another significant, harshly contested episode in the history of both peoples.

On the Palestinian side that struggle was marked by the false claim of a massacre in Jenin. The New York Times failed to report on one of the most relevant details in debunking that libel.

Q. Can the IDF code of ethics undergo changes? "The code is stable. The more abstract the values are, the less they change. The doctrines can change because we are in new situations all the time. The doctrine of combating terror, which I dealt with together with Maj. Gen. Amos Yadlin, who was the head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, includes a new situation in which terrorists live among civilians. We must free ourselves from the attitude that regards others' lives with fear and trembling while holding the lives of our own combat soldiers in complete contempt. International law wants to impose a position on us whereby soldiers are a consumable resource and that the lives of enemy civilians must be protected more than the lives of our own combat troops. Bandages are a consumable resource. Water is a consumable resource. Human beings are not. "If we warned the terrorists' neighbors to leave the area, in Arabic, in any way — flyers, telephone calls, television broadcasts, a warning noise — and they stay anyway — why are they staying? Because they choose to be human shields for terrorists. I do not want to kill a human being only because he is a human shield, if he is not a threat to me. But should a soldier of mine risk himself for him? Is the blood of a human shield any redder than the blood of my soldier? A soldier has no choice other than to be in Gaza, in that alleyway. But to be sent inside — why? In the battle in Jenin, in the middle of Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF knew that the refugee camp was booby-trapped. But they still insisted on not bombing from the air in order to keep from harming civilians, and they suffered terrible losses. That was a mistake. They should have made an effort to get the civilian population out of the terrorist environment, and then there would have been no need to send in the infantry."

Even ten years later it's astounding to reflect on how oblivious the world is to the care Israel's takes to avoid collateral damage.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

"Not Just Wishful Thinking"

EMET -- the Endowment for Middle East Truth -- is pleased to bring to Capitol Hill, Sgt. Benjamin Anthony, founder of the non-profit "Our Soldiers Speak."

Sgt. Benjamin Anthony (IDF. Res.), is a combat veteran and combat reservist in the Israel Defense Forces. As a heavy machine gunner, he has taken a full and front line roll in several of Israel’s most recent campaigns to defend it’s citizens in the face of new age terrorist activity, serving in large operations both within and beyond Israel’s borders.

Since his release from full- time service, Benjamin Anthony has established an organization - Our Soldiers Speak- a nonprofit-non-governmental body that has one aim, clear and singular: to bring the proud truth of Israel’s soldiers from the front lines of combat to the English speaking world, whenever and wherever audience is granted.

Perhaps my need to report some news that is potentially positive is kicking in. Today the state of the world still seems grim, but a tad less so.

The last residents -- 18 families -- of the houses in Ulpana slated for expulsion were moved out today.

With this, we have been mindful that one of the next issues to be faced is that of Migron, where there is also a Court-ordered expulsion, to be carried out before August 1.

But according to information acquired by Israel Hayom: in an effort to prevent that expulsion, an American Jewish philanthropist -- whose name has not been revealed -- has bought land constituting more than 80% of Migron from the Arabs who claimed ownership.

Reorganizing files for my past articles I came across some amusing and revealing things you might enjoy, showing how often the region doesn’t really change in some key ways and how rarely Western observers learn from events.

This protest seemed less credible when, three days later, Sharif himself had an operation in an Israeli hospital. He was not alone. Another hundred Palestinians received passes to obtain special care during the closure’s first days.

2002

A key element in the way Arafat is often interpreted is to treat each of his declarations as if it has no history behind it. Thus, when he denounces terrorist attacks on Israel, pledges to make reforms, and asks for patience, this is merely a repetition of statements made many times previously without results. Often, though, headlines around the world about Arafat opposing violence or favoring compromise drown out the fact that these sound bites have long proved empty public relations’ gestures….

The Egyptian perspective was aired recently by Morsi in a television interview during the presidential campaign. Israel, he said, had not kept its commitment under the Camp David accords to reach a broader Middle East peace, particularly with the Palestinians.

Yesterday, the first 15 families living in the five Ulpana houses slated for evacuation, by order of the High Court, moved out to their temporary homes ("caravillas" -- a misnomer, I think) on the grounds of a former army base.

They went quietly but with deep sadness -- knowing in their hearts that an injustice was being done to them. I carry that same knowledge in my heart.

I dealt with this issue of the injustice in some detail in a recent posting that can be accessed here: The Face of Things to Come.

David Bedein, of the Israel Resource News Agency, writes about A Candid Moment with a Journalist, the journalist in this case being Chemi Shalev, the newly appointed US correspondent for the English language edition of HaAretz. Shalev appeared at the annual American Jewish Press Association (AJPA) Conference in Philadelphia last week. Due to influence of Ha'aretz English on foreign reporters, this was obviously a unique opportunity to hear first hand how Ha'aretz approaches news in Israel and the Middle East.

They asked Chemi Shalev the following question:

Why does HaAretz not report what the Palestinian Authority communicates to their people in their language, on the PBC TV, the PBC radio, Palestinian Authority newspapers and the Palestinian Authority schools?

Shalev's response: "We do not have room to cover all of that"

Bedin notes that

[O]ver the past few weeks, PBC TV has conducted daily features which promote the armed struggle to liberate all of Palestine, praise for those who martyr themselves while murdering Jews, transforming Israeli cities into Arab cities, and worse.

And then there are the new school books of the PA, which indoctrinate the next generation to liberate all of Palestine by the force of arms, while the theme of PA education remains the “right of return” to Arab villages from 1948 within the green line which no longer exist.

But Chemi Shalev's Haaretz does not have the room to cover all of that

At least Shalev did not claim it was too difficult or time consuming--Bedein explains how easy it is today for reporters to access the materials that so clearly illustrate the daily incitement of hatred against Israel by Abbas the Palestinian Authority.

But then there was the followup question to Shalev:

In the context of any article that HaAretz runs on the peace process, why not mention what the spokespeople of the PA say that day in their media and in their own language?

Shalev's response this time: "As an editor, I would recommend not covering that"

Bedein writes:

In other words, a senior editor of HaAretz admitted to a gathering of journalists that his newspaper engages in a journalistic indiscretion.

As a matter of policy, Shalev admitted, Haaretz will not report the consistent message that the Palestinian Authority conveys in the Arabic language.

Shalev admits that Haaretz promotes an inaccurate and incomplete picture of Israel and the Middle East--a biased picture picked up by all of those foreign journalists who have been duped they are getting expert and objective information from Haaretz.

But at least those looking for fodder to feed their Antisemtic hunger have a place to go.

The vast literature proving the historic Jewish connection to the Land of Israel has been extensively manipulated and distorted as part of the Palestinian politics of nationalism. Propaganda, indoctrination, and socialization, both domestically and internationally, are essential parts of the strategy and tactics of asserting Palestinian nationhood and statehood. By appropriating to themselves the values, traditions, and historical facts that belong to the Jews, Palestinians have managed to fabricate a "legitimate" history and political traditions out of nothing while denying those of Israel.

Amid the intensifying crisis in Syria, which in recent weeks has seen massacres of the civilian population in various parts of the country, Iranian military, propaganda, and economic assistance keeps flowing in, and its aim is to help President Bashar al-Assad survive. Iran views the confrontation in Syria as a critical battleground with the West regarding the reshaping of the Middle East and its own role in the region as a key, vital, and influential player.

At present Hizbullah weapons are serving - under Iran's command - as part of Assad's apparatus of violent repression. Esmail Ghani, deputy commander of the Revolutionary Guards Corp - Qods Force (IRGC-QF), is the most senior Iranian military official so far to have revealed its activity in Syria. In an interview with the Iranian Students News Agency (ISNA), he acknowledged that elements of the IRGC-QF have been involved in Syrian events.

Instead, the visit this week looks like it’s turning into a political fiasco. Included in the delegation of Egyptian lawmakers was Hani Nour Eldin, who, in addition to being a newly elected member of parliament, is a member of the Gamaa Islamiya, or the Egyptian Islamic Group—a U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The group was banned under former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and is now a recognized Islamist political party. Its spiritual leader, Omar Abdel Rahman—also known as the “blind sheik”—was convicted in 1995 of plotting attacks on New York City landmarks and transportation centers, and is serving a life sentence in a North Carolina federal prison.

When the story broke, the Obama administration promised an investigation.
And they did.

Rabbi Yaakov Kamenetsky once said at convention of Agudath Israel that but for the birth of the state of Israel most non-religious Jews would have fallen into such despair after the Holocaust that their connection with the Jewish people would have been severed forever. My own life and that of many of those closest to me attests to the truth of Reb Yaakov's statement. Yet I wonder if many of those fortunate enough to have been born into observant homes understand how central Israel has been to the ba'al teshuva movement or why.

Egypt's longtime banned Muslim Brotherhood—the parent organization of nearly every subsequent Islamist movement, including al-Qaeda—has just won the nation's presidency, in the name of its candidate, Muhammad Morsi. That apathy reigns in the international community, when once such news would have been deemed devastating, is due to the successful efforts of Muslim apologists and subversive agents in the West who portray the Brotherhood as "moderate Islamists"—irrespective that such a formulation is oxymoronic, since to be "Islamist," to be a supporter of draconian Sharia, is by definition to be immoderate.

Obama administration officials naturally took it a step further, portraying the Brotherhood as "largely secular" and "pluralistic."

Back in the real world, evidence that the Brotherhood is just another hostile Islamist group bent on achieving world domination through any means possible is overwhelming. Here are just three examples that recently surfaced, all missed by the Western media, and all exposing the Brotherhood as hostile to "infidels" (non-Muslims) in general, hostile to the Christians in their midst (the Copts) in particular, and on record calling on Muslims to lie and cheat during elections to empower Sharia:

How will Iranians respond to an Israeli strike against their nuclear infrastructure? The answers to this prediction matters greatly, affecting not just Jerusalem's decision but also how much other states work to impede an Israeli strike.

Analysts generally offer up best-case predictions for policies of deterrence and containment (some commentators even go so far as to welcome an Iranian nuclear capability) while forecasting worst-case results from a strike. They foresee Tehran doing everything possible to retaliate, such as kidnapping, terrorism, missile attacks, naval combat, and closing the Strait of Hormuz. These predictions ignore two facts: neither of Israel's prior strikes against enemy states building nuclear weapons, Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007, prompted retaliation; and a review the Islamic Republic of Iran's history since 1979 points to "a more measured and less apocalyptic—if still sobering—assessment of the likely aftermath of a preventive strike."

The authors, Michael Eisenstadt and Michael Knights of the Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy.

The Obama administration’s political and financial backing of the UN Human Rights Council resulted in another win for Hamas on Friday, June 22 in Geneva. A Hamas-affiliated organization and its supporters held an “informal parallel meeting” promoting the destruction of the Jewish state at the UN’s Palais des Nations.

The event was advertised on the UN website and listed on an official UN document headlined “Human Rights Council, twentieth session, 18 June – 06 July 2012.”

Opening week of the Council’s latest session, therefore, featured both friends of Hamas sporting UN passes and championing an end to a Jewish state, and Obama’s Ambassador (and former California fundraiser) Eileen Donahoe painting the Council as the place to be to promote and protect human rights.

June 24, 2012:

I waited until the official presidential election results in Egypt were announced before doing this post. Word has just come out from the Supreme Presidential Electoral Commission that, in the presidential election run-off, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Mohamed Morsi (or Mursi), has garnered 51.7 % of the vote, defeating former general Ahmed Shafik, who was prime minister under Mubarak.

Morsi, it should be noted, is a US-educated engineer, and spent time in jail during Mubarak's regime.

This is the first time in 60 years that the president of Egypt will not have come out of the military.

During a Homeland Security committee hearing last week on the "Radicalization of Muslim-Americans," Texas Congressman Al Green (D) criticized the hearings as biased and unfair to Muslims, suggesting that the only way to justify them is if Congress would also conduct a "hearing on the radicalization of Christians."

Though his position may seem balanced, in fact, it reveals a dangerous mix of irrationality, moral relativism, and emotionalism—all disastrous traits in a U.S. Congressman. Consider some of Green's assertions:

I don't think that most people oppose hearings on radicalization. I do not, not — N-O-T — oppose hearings on radicalization. I do oppose hearings that don't focus on the entirety of radicalization…. [W]hy not have a hearing on the radicalization of Christians?... People who see the hearings and never hear about the hearing on the radicalization of Christianity have to ask themselves, "Why is this missing?"

Fair question—"Why not have a hearing on the radicalization of Christians?"

Dror Eydar writes about a topic that is in the news again: Who is a refugee?. Eydar writes about a new development:

A key achievement can be credited to Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. He is promoting a new memorial day on the Jewish calendar – Jewish refugee day. On this day, we will remember the 850,000 Jewish refugees who were forced to flee from Arab states. This would not just be a symbolic act; in our blood-soaked region, remembrance carries a political and diplomatic meaning. The Palestinians are speaking about refugees at length? Then we will too. While our refugees have assimilated into society, the Palestinian refuges have always been, and still remain, no more than a propaganda tool for their leaders.

Even after the two-month presidential campaign, Mr. Morsi remains an unfamiliar figure to most Egyptians. He was living and working in Los Angeles during the tumultuous period after Islamic militants assassinated Anwar Sadat and his successor, Mr. Mubarak, cracked down on the Brotherhood. Those who knew him in America say Mr. Morsi never appeared notably political or religious.

Presidents generally receive more credit than they deserve when the economy is doing well, and more blame than they deserve when it is floundering. There does not exist a simple box of tools that guarantee economic growth, and many of the short-range tools that do exist come with some pretty hefty negative consequences down the line.

Sunday, June 24, 2012

The downfall of dictators is often their stupidity, arrogance, and unbridled aggression. Saddam Hussein might have stayed in power if he had simply admitted not having weapons of mass destruction. Muammar Qaddafi could have survived if he had not made blood-curdling statements about massacring everyone in Benghazi.

"I just can’t do what I done beforeI just can’t beg you anymoreI’m gonna let you passAnd I’ll go lastThen time will tell just who fellAnd who’s been left behindWhen you go your way and I go mine."--Bob Dylan, "Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine"

Muhammad al-Mursi, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, has become president of Egypt. But what does it mean to be president of Egypt? That’s the current question. Let me divide the discussion into two parts: What does this tell about “us” and what does this tell about Egypt and its future?

First, what does it tell about the West? The answer is that there are things that can be learned and understood, leading to some predictive power, but unfortunately the current hegemonic elite and its worldview refuses to learn.

What could be more revealing of that fact then the words off Jacqueline Stevens in the New York Times [Political Scientists Are Lousy Forecasters]: “Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts.” Well, it depends on which experts.

One man cannot spend enough to ensure the election of an unpopular candidate, as Mr. Gingrich’s collapse showed, but he can buy enough ads to help push a candidate over the top in a close race like this year’s. Given that Mr. Romney was not his first choice, why is Mr. Adelson writing these huge checks?

The most surprising aspect of the current presidential race – to me at least -- is not that Mitt Romney appears to be clawing his way into contention, after an extremely divisive Republican season, but rather that he is not yet far ahead.

The Obama administration has fallen into an unfortunate habit in its desperation to burnish strong foreign policy credentials – claiming its representatives have made robust statements to an international audience that they haven’t. On Monday this week it happened again. The State Department posted what was alleged to be a hard-nosed speech delivered by UN Human Rights Council Ambassador Eileen Donahoe in Geneva at the opening of the Council’s latest session. Listening closely to what she actually said, the tough talk wasn’t uttered.

Here is what the State Department claims Obama’s Ambassador said, but didn’t:

Here’s still another of a series of self-serving leaks from the Obama Administration. In this case, however, different from the half-dozen previous examples, it reveals something very important about policy. Call it, “Fast and Furious, Middle East Style.”

In the Fast and Furious operation, the U.S. government funneled weapons to Mexican drug gangs. Now it is funneling weapons, at least indiscriminately, to anti-American, antisemitic, radical forces in Syria. That is, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.

Suppose that there was one Mexican drug gang that was a bit more brutal. Would Fast and Furious then have been a great idea because it left that one out of the weapons’ distribution?

As Egypt's presidential elections come to a close, with the Brotherhood claiming presidential victory, the future of Egypt's indigenous Christians, the Copts, looks bleak..

Earlier, after the first presidential elections of May 23-24, any number of Islamists denounced them, bemoaning that it was the Copts who were responsible for the secularist candidate Ahmed Shafiq's good showing.

Even though Shafiq is a "remnant" of the Mubarak regime, which Copts suffered under, he is widely seen as the much lesser of two evils. As one Copt put it: "What did they want us to do? Whoever says that supporting Shafiq is a crime against the 25 January Revolution, we ask him to advise us whom to vote for? The sea is in front of us and the Islamists are behind us."

There were recently two articles in the New York Times. One was in an opinion section called "Latitudes." The other was in the news section. Despite the different editorial locations, comparing the two articles can serve as an exercise to see how a newspaper's reporting can distort perceptions.

Today the Emergency Committee for Israel released the following ad in New York City drawing attention to Charles Barron's disturbing record of support for dictators, murderers, and racists.

ECI's executive director, Noah Pollak, said:

Charles Barron has a history of making vile statements in support of mass-murderers like Robert Mugabe and Muammar Qaddafi, attacking Israel's right to exist, and daring decent people to use those statements against him. While Barron collects endorsements from the likes of David Duke, the Emergency Committee for Israel is proud to stand with those Democrats fighting to keep Barron out of Congress.

I don't know exactly how I should refer to the behavior of the six nations that are "negotiating" with Iran. But "stupid" doesn't quite cut it for me.

The two-day talks in Moscow, just completed, were an abysmal failure that went no where. French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius referred to "the large gap between the two sides."

According to a report in Haaretz, "A Western diplomat who asked to remain anonymous said that one major obstacle revealed by the Moscow talks relates to the underground facility for uranium enrichment in Fordo, near the city of Qum. According to the diplomat, the Iranians refused to discuss the Fordo plant at all."

What does the international community imagine is going on there? And do they not know that there is reason to suspect that Iran may be operating covert enrichment sites as well?

Thursday, June 21, 2012

When massive street protests propelled President Hosni Mubarak out of office 18 months ago, Egyptians proudly called the event a revolution. Now that revolution is looking more and more like a palace coup, with the Mubarak ouster cleverly camouflaged in the language of democracy by a military working to prevent the total collapse of the old order. By jettisoning a leader who had stayed past his sell-by date, the generals — suddenly sympathetic to the protesters — bought time to re-engineer their hold on power even as the military played its Islamist and secular challengers against each other.The Military Shows Egypt Who's Boss, Time Magazine, July 2, 2012

In response to the Time Magazine article above, by Tony Karon and Abigail Hauslohner, that Democracy has suddenly been snatched away 18 months after Tahrir Square, Daniel Pipes responds that the Egypt's Palace Coup was to be expected:

Palestinian medical sources reported that twelve residents were wounded, on Thursday before noon, after a siege-busting tunnel collapsed, east of the Sheikh Zayed area, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.

We know from past experience how easily Occupied Palestine tosses words around. Is this really a case of a "siege-busting tunnel" collapsing?

If the purpose of the tunnel is to mitigate the Israeli siege by getting goods from Egypt--why is this tunnel located "east of the Sheikh Zayed area, in the northern part of the Gaza Strip"? Are Gazans suddenly tunneling to the Mediterranean Sea?

Knowing that the unquestioning media will blindly accept anything they say, Hamas has decided to make believe that all of those rockets targeting unarmed Israeli civilians--were actually targeted at Israeli military bases:

21-06-2012,11:23
Al Qassam website – Ezzedeen Al Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas, fired dozens of mortars and rockets at the Israeli military sites around Gaza Strip in response to the Israeli violations against Gaza people in the past three days.

The Brigades said in a recent statement that its operatives in Gaza have fired 120 rockets and mortar shells at Israeli military sites around Gaza.

And Hamas even provides us with a list of the military targets that they so bravely targeted in Israel:

Things have come to a pretty pass,
Our romance is growing flat,
For you like this and the other
While I go for this and that.
Goodness knows what the end will be,
Oh, I don't know where I'm at...
It looks as if we two will never be one,
Something must be done.

You say eether and I say eyether,
You say neether and I say nyther,
Eether, eyether, neether, nyther,
Let's call the whole thing off!
You like potato and I like potahto,
You like tomato and I like tomahto,
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
Let's call the whole thing off!Louis Armstrong, Let's Call The Whole Thing Off

Israel and the Palestinian Authority don't see eye to eye on many things these days:

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority refuses to accept Israel's right to exist

Abbas and the Palestinian Authority refuse to accept that Palestinian attacks that kill Israelis--including suicide bombings against civilians--are terror.

Abbas and the PA refuses to recognize Israel's fight against Palestinian terror as self-defense.

The PA refuses to refer to Israel's Arab citizens as 'Israeli Arabs' or 'Arab Israelis'.

The Palestinian refugees are characterized as a young population where 41.7% are under the age of 15 in Palestinian territory, 35.9% of Palestinian refugees in Jordan were under 15 in 2007, 33.1% of Palestinian refugees in Syria were under 15 in 2009, and 30.4% of the refugees in Lebanon were under 15 in 2010.Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics

---

So a young American boy of, say, ten years of age born in Chicago to American parents, but whose grandparents were Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948, is counted by UNRWA as a “Palestinian refugee.”Elliot Abrams

It is a tribute to the disinformation campaign of UNRWA that so many of those who read the statement above from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

The ordeal of Syria has been a rebuttal of what the diplomacy of Barack Obama once promised and stood for. It is largely forgotten now that Syria and Iran were the two regimes in the Greater Middle East that Mr. Obama had promised to "engage."

The UN’s top human rights body, the UN Human Rights Council, opened its current session in Geneva this week with…Canada-bashing. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay, ran down a list of human rights issues around the world that in her view were particularly pressing: Syria for crimes against humanity, a military coup in Mali, torture and summary executions in Eritrea, political prison camps and public executions in North Korea – and human rights in Quebec.

The only human rights issue Pillay described as “alarming” were “moves to restrict freedom of assembly” and the only alarming instance she could summon up were restrictions in Quebec. The only issue about which she said she was “disappointed” was the law in Quebec. And the only specific concern she had with the violation of “freedom of association” anywhere the world over was in Quebec.

When last I wrote, a member of an Israeli crew working on the fence being constructed on our border with Sinai -- precisely to prevent infiltration into Israel -- had just been killed by terrorists who had crossed over from Sinai. (According to one report, one terrorist shot by the IDF was wearing a suicide belt, and planning considerably greater damage.)

This followed by two days the launching of two Grad Katyusha rockets from the Sinai into the Negev.

Then, very shortly after the attack at the fence, rocket attacks from Gaza began.

The army statement at that time was that there was no connection between the Gaza rocket launchings and the terrorist attack out of the Sinai. Such coincidental timing left me a bit dubious.

In 2005, four years after the 9/11 attacks, The Michigan Daily published an article with the headline “Arab Americans Better Educated Than Most in U.S.” It is a classic American success story: Arabs had come from countries all over the Middle East and North Africa, flourished, and integrated.

A Palestinian mosque in the village of Jabaa was vandalized and partially set on fire early Tuesday morning, Israeli and Palestinian officials said, with both sides suspecting Israeli settlers of the attack.CNN, Palestinian mosque burned in suspected settler attack, June 19, 2012

If Israelis were responsible for the burning of the mosque, then they should--and will--be held responsible.

By the same token, there is a possibility that the burning of the mosque was done by Muslims.
After all, Muslims have burned mosques before:

The armed wing of Hamas, the Islamic militant group that governs here, fired barrages of rockets into southern Israel on Tuesday after a break of more than a year during which the group largely adhered to an informal cease-fire.
...
Hamas has kept out of the last few rounds of violence, leaving smaller, more radical groups like Islamic Jihad to fire rockets and then restraining them in an effort to restore calm, often with the help of Egyptian mediators.

First of all, either Hamas observed the ceasefire or not. If it "largely adhered to" the ceasefire, it wasn't a ceasefire.

Has anyone stopped to ask where the headlines "Muslim Brotherhood Wins Egypt's Presidential Election!" originate? They come, of course, straight from the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies—particularly the Qatar-based Islamist propaganda machine, Al Jazeera—and were then unquestioningly picked up and spread like wildfire by the Western mainstream media and talking-heads.

Left unquoted by the Western media are the many Egyptian analysts that have a different tale to tell—that the secular candidate, Ahmed Shafiq, has won.

Usually, when the Palestinian Arabs blame Israel, you can count on the Media repeating the claim by Palestinian terrorists. Here pro-Palestinian apologist claim that Israel is responsible for the death of an Arab child: Hadeel Al-Haddad.

The truth is that the viciousness of Palestinian terrorists, their carelessness and their disregard for Human life killed that child.

“Hitler’s primary task was to put himself over as a misunderstood moderate….Trotsky summed it up neatly: ‘Anyone who expects to meet a lunatic brandishing a hatchet and instead finds a man hiding a revolver in his trouser-pocket is bound to feel relieved. But that doesn’t prevent a revolver from being more dangerous than a hatchet.’”
–Joel Carmichael, Trotsky: An Appreciation of his Life, p. 396.

Months ago, when it was at its height, I wrote that the hysteria about Israel allegedly being about to attack Iran and the argument by some that Israel should do so were nonsense. Now it is clear that there was never any chance that such a thing would happen. And that idea was a bad one expressed by non-Israelis who didn’t know what they were talking about.

Executive Summary

President Obama apparently believed that pressuring Israel to halt construction of homes in Jewish neighborhoods in parts of Jerusalem formerly controlled by Jordan would advance peace. In reality, the opposite ensued. As a result, he was the first president since the Madrid conference in 1991 to have had no sustained high-level, direct negotiations between the parties. Never before were peace negotiations held up by putting the wish for a settlement freeze first. Mahmoud Abbas participated in 18 years of direct negotiations with seven Israeli governments, all without the settlements freeze that he now insists is an absolute precondition to begin even low-level talks.

President Obama apparently believed that pressuring Israel to halt construction of homes in Jewish neighborhoods in parts of Jerusalem formerly controlled by Jordan would advance peace. In reality, the opposite ensued. As a result, he was the first president since the Madrid conference in 1991 to have had no sustained high-level, direct negotiations between the parties. Never before were peace negotiations held up by putting the wish for a settlement freeze first. Mahmoud Abbas participated in 18 years of direct negotiations with seven Israeli governments, all without the settlements freeze that he now insists is an absolute precondition to begin even low-level talks.

But while Jews do say they plan to vote for Obama over Romney — by 51% to 43% in the June poll — they don’t seem to support him in numbers much greater than the general population.Jewish Forward, Are New York Jews Abandoning Obama?, June 18, 2012

Monday, June 18, 2012

A new two-day round of "negotiations" with Iran regarding its nuclear capacity began today in Moscow. A Russian media source refers to this as a "round table discussion," which tells us more than a little. "Russia hopes that it will help restore trust between Iran and the West."

Iranian National Security Council Secretary Saeed Jalili heads the team representing Iran. Catherine Ashton, foreign affairs head for the EU, leads the delegation of six nations facing off against Iran: Russia, the UK, China, the US, France, and Germany (the permanent members of the Security Council plus Germany).

As of late today, there was discontent expressed by a member of the Iranian negotiating team: "So far the atmosphere is not positive. Setting up the framework [for negotiations] is the main problem."

Many are the lessons to be learned between the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and the current revolutions of the Arab world.

Consider the issue of the hijab, the female "veil"—the proliferation of which, according to one former Islamist and associate of al-Qaeda's Ayman Zawahiri, is associated with a Muslim society's downward spiral into oppression and terror.

Prior to Egypt's presidential elections, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate, Muhammad Morsi, assured the nation's liberals and secularists that, as president, he would certainly not enforce the hijab: "Many people are speaking nonsense, saying that I will impose the hijab against the will of the people; no one is going to force anyone to wear a specific uniform."

These are famous words, spoken almost verbatim some 33 years earlier, in Iran, at the time of the 1979 revolution.

About Me

When I am not blogging at Daled Amos, I am sharing articles and the great posts of others on my account on Google Plus.

I write about the Middle East in general and about Israel in particular -- especially about issues affecting Israel in the Middle East and how Israel is impacted by policy in the current Obama administration.